Tips and advice straight from the Lightroom team.

Archive for April, 2014

We recently introduced a new Preview feature in Camera Raw 8.4. The new Preview feature enhances the before and after preview in the following ways:

provides a side by side view of changes. This gives you a real time before and after preview.

allows you to set the ‘before’ state. This gives you control over what you are comparing.

With the new functionality, you still have the functionality that you previously had, such as comparing before and after. You can do this by tapping the keyboard shortcut P to toggle between the before and after. Now, you can also set the before state using the keyboard shortcut Alt/Option P. If you want to preview changes only in a specific panel (such as the Detail panel), you can do this by visiting the panel, setting the before state (press Alt/Option P), making the desired changes, and comparing before/after (press P). Note that this approach lets you do before/after comparisons for groups of changes in different panels, too — for example, tone changes made in both the Basic panel and the Tone Curve panel.

We just released Camera Raw 8.4.1, which fixed a bug that caused Camera Raw to forget the “Before” settings when switching from image to image in the filmstrip, thereby preventing the new Preview feature from working. This bug only affected customers using multiple images with Photoshop CC.

I’m keenly aware that photographers would like to leave their laptops behind and head out on the road with just their DSLR, Camera Connection Kit and an iPad. It’s not just pros on a shoot in the middle of a remote location, it extends all the way to every photography enthusiast who has debated with their spouse on the necessity of bringing a bulky laptop on the family vacation. This is something the Lightroom team wants to tackle with Lightroom mobile and customers can realize the beginning of this in a JPEG-only workflow. But there are a few hurdles we need to address before we can have a robust experience that’s able to include raw files:

We know our customers often like to shoot in a raw format. That’s a lot of data and the ingest experience on current iPads via a Camera Connection Kit is quite slow.

The way the Camera Roll works on iOS, an application like Lightroom mobile would need to duplicate the storage required by a photographer’s images then leave customers with an awkward deletion experience on the camera roll to save space.

The bandwidth required to pass the originals from the iPad through to our servers and back to your desktop would be substantial and slow.

We’ve utilized a Smart Preview solution on the desktop to expedite access to original files on mobile devices but that becomes more difficult going in the other direction due to processing requirements and the fact that customers would expect the original to eventually arrive on their desktop.(And that transfer to the desktop should occur without a kludgey, manual copy and link-to-original workflow from the CF or SD card) We’ll need to address all three of these areas before we can have a suitable field triage workflow. We can tackle the bandwidth requirement with intelligent, downstream use of P2P connections but the first two issues will still remain a challenge.

The team would love to hear your thoughts and expectations in this area.

Camera Raw 8.4 is now available as a final release for Photoshop CS6 and Photoshop CC. This release provides new features including new preview controls, red eye correction for pets and updates to Local Corrections. In addition, this release also includes bug fixes, support for new cameras and new lenses. DNG Converter 8.4 is provided for customers using versions of Photoshop older than Photoshop CS6.

As mentioned here, updates to Camera Raw 8 for Photoshop CS6 only include new camera support, lens profile support, and bug fixes. The new features listed in the release notes are only available in Photoshop CC.

Please note that Camera Raw 8.4 and DNG Converter 8.4 will not work on Windows XP, Windows Vista or Mac OSX 10.6. Impacted customers can continue either update to compatible operating system or continue to use Camera Raw 8.3 for Photoshop CS6. Photoshop CS6 customers on Windows 7, Windows 8, Mac OSX 10.7 (Lion), Mac OSX 10.8 (Mountain Lion) or Mac OSX 10.9 (Mavericks) will not be impacted and will continue to receive updated camera support through future ACR 8.x dot releases.

Release Notes

Features:

Updates to the Preview Controls. The main idea is a simple “Before/After” set of image settings. Details:

The Preview checkbox has been replaced by three buttons in the bottom-right of the ACR main dialog. From left to right, they are:

Mode: Click this button to cycle through left/right and top/bottom side-by-side and split-view modes. Click-and-hold this button to bring up a popup menu for directly choosing Preview modes and accessing the Preview Preferences. Keyboard shortcut: Press Q to cycle through the Preview modes.

Copy: Click this button to copy the After settings to the Before settings. This is useful for establishing a temporary “checkpoint” for your image editing session. Keyboard shortcut: Press Option-P to copy After settings to the Before settings for the primary selected image only. Press Shift-Option-P to copy After settings to the Before settings for all selected images.

The After preview image always reflects the current slider and tool settings (White Balance, Exposure, etc.).

The standard single-image view always shows the After state.

In the side-by-side and split-view modes, the Before settings are always shown on the left or top, and the After settings are always shown on the right or bottom.

The Preview Preferences dialog supports customizing the Preview modes used for cycling and some drawing options.

When using any tool other than Zoom and Pan (hand) in a side-by-side or split-view, changes are only allowed on the After view. Using the Crop tool will put you back into the standard single-image mode.

Zooming and panning on one view will automatically zoom and pan the other.

Reposition catchlights to create a more natural look by dragging within the overlay that surrounds the catchlight.

Changes to Local Corrections:

Added a mechanism to quickly reset all local correction sliders (Temperature, Exposure, etc.) to zero: right-click on a local adjustment pin and choose “Reset Local Correction Settings” from the context menu. Another way is to click on a local adjustment pin, and then choose “Reset Local Correction Settings” from the flyout menu.

Added “Fill Image” to context menu for Radial Filter. Right-click on a radial filter adjustment pin and choose “Fill Image” from the context menu to resize the radial filter to cover the image area. (Shortcut: double-click inside the ellipse overlay for a radial filter adjustment to accomplish the same task.)

Added “Check All” and “Check None” buttons to Synchronize, New Preset, Save Settings, and Copy/Paste (Bridge) dialog boxes. These are shortcuts for checking all/none of the check boxes.

Added keyboard shortcut: When using the Crop Tool or Straighten Tool, press the X key to flip the crop aspect ratio (landscape to portrait, portrait to landscape).

Added context menu to Histogram pane. The context menu can be used to enable Lab color readouts, even when the Workflow Options are set to another color space (such as Adobe RGB). The context menu and also be used to toggle the shadow, highlight, and gamut clipping warnings.

Lightroom 5.4 is now available as a final release on Adobe.com and through the update mechanism in Lightroom 5. The goal of this release is to provide support for Lightroom mobile, additional camera raw support, lens profile support and address bugs that were introduced in previous releases of Lightroom.

Lightroom mobile extends your existing workflows beyond the desktop, allowing you to utilize your Android phone to review and edit your images and have the changes sync back to your Lightroom catalog at home, including:

access images in your Lightroom catalog

make selects, reject unworthy photos

apply a preset

fine tunes your images using the Basic panel

import new photos directly from the Gallery

Once you’ve told Lightroom a collection of pictures should be sent to Lightroom mobile, the process is handled automatically and the pictures will become available on your Android phone once it is connected to the internet. Any changes you make in Lightroom mobile will be automatically synced and updated back to the Lightroom catalog on your desktop.

Can be used to make adjustments even when the original files aren’t available locally

Adjustments made to Smart Previews are applied to the original when the original files are available

NOTE – It may take up t0 24 hours for Lightroom mobile to be available in your local Google Play app store.

How to get started:

Download the latest version of Lightroom 5

Lightroom mobile is a companion to Lightroom desktop. Please update to the latest version of Lightroom 5 using either the Creative Cloud app or by clicking on the “Help-> Check for Updates” menu option.

Lightroom mobile is organized around Collections. Images within Collections will be synced and be available in Lightroom mobile.

Download Lightroom mobile

Visit the Google Play store and download Lightroom mobile. Once you login with the same Creative Cloud account, you’ll see all of your synced Collections.

Check out your photos at lightroom.adobe.com

In addition to Lightroom mobile, we’ve also launched Lightroom web, a new way to view and share your images from any web browser. Available at http://lightroom.adobe.com.

System Requirements

Processor : Quad Core CPU with 1.7 GHZ ARMv7 architecture

RAM : 1 GB

Internal Storage: 8 GB

Android Jellybean, KitKat, or Lollipop

Give us feedback!

Once you’ve gotten started with Lightroom mobile, don’t forget to leave us feedback about your experiences. Lightroom wouldn’t be what it is today without the loyal community of regular customers who help us find and fix common issues. If you keep talking to us, we’ll keep listening.